Check out Noe’s brand new new YouTube channel, featuring official music videos, behind the scenes glimpses, musings and more!

Reviews

Meet a singer – songwriter even David Lynch could love.
SF Bay Guardian

Spellbinding.
Cutting Edge Voices

Noe’s music stuns and enraptures so thoroughly that multiple listenings are required to unravel her mysteries of music and meaning.

SF Bay Guardian

Noe Venable’s shivering soprano and ghostly melodies are like poems and exorcisms.

Willamette Weekly (Portland, OR)

Noe Venable is a treasure, with a poet’s eye, keen vision and a soprano voice that gives flight to stories that tend to veer off the center of the singer/songwriter beaten track.

Entertainment Today L.A.

San Francisco’s award-winning singer-songwriter Noe Venable has a ton of talent packed into her tiny frame. That’s likely why Ani DiFranco keeps inviting her out on tour … that, and, like DiFranco, she’s got a wonderfully wacky sense of humor. Venable’s latest album is also her most ambitious, seductive and engaging. With just an electric piano backing her up… on the opening “riverWide,” (Venable) is just playing a trick, starting off with an odd little distraction so that when she unleashes her powers and allure, aiming them at that special spot between your throat and heart, they’ll hit with maximum impact. Swirling and smoky, “Juniper” meticulously melts the mind and haunts the heart. Like most of Venable’s songs, it sounds like it comes from another time and place, a spot in the past that held more beauty and magic than we can presently imagine…

-In Music We Trust

The new collection of songs sounds as if it could have been inspired by a fever dream… Venable says this record is her most personal collection of songs to date, but her work isn’t that of your typical confessional folksinger. For one thing, it’s not really folk music. Though she does often play open chords strummed on acoustic guitar, it’s where the words and ideas take the songs that makes them distinctive. Venable’s unique point of view emerges in lyrics that can sometimes come across more like allegories than first-person stories. Even when she’s tackling personal or familial issues, as in “Juniper” and “In the Dark,” the metaphors she chooses and the way she twists language remove the subject matter a few steps from personal experience. In addition, the eerie guitar effects and hypnotic loops that haunt the corners of songs such as “Feral” distance Venable even further from the conventional singer-songwriter genre, giving her more in common with Tom Waits and Radiohead than with Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan.

-Acoustic Guitar Magazine

Only a couple of records lately have pulled me from song to song to the end; one was Van Morrison’s Down the Road and the other was Noe Venable’s Boots.
-L.A. Weekly

Interviews

The “summer storm,” she says, “is this place you come to where your beliefs and your ideas about who you are and what you’re about and what life is about and what you’re doing here – you can’t hold onto them anymore. You have to change, and how you face that change says a lot. And I have to say, I did not want to change.”

SF Gate 

“For a long time, I’d been a singer-songwriter, living the touring life. But I needed a place to do some searching, and going back to school was a great way to spend time reading and thinking and exploring what more I can do in this world to be of service,” she says.

SF Examiner

“I looked up and saw this huge deer bathed in blue light from a streetlamp, with antlers as big as my arms could reach,” she recalled in a recent phone conversation from her Brooklyn apartment. “It was an otherworldly vision. I was staring right into his eyes and felt like I was in the presence of royalty. As he passed into a space between two houses it became clear he was old and limping and I wondered where could he go.”

SF Gate